


Refraction

by LuckyDiceKirby



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Kingdom Hearts III Spoilers, ansem the wise is still on my shit list just BY THE WAY, repliku but only in absentia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 14:08:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyDiceKirby/pseuds/LuckyDiceKirby
Summary: Riku delivers a message to Ienzo.





	Refraction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Suedeuxnim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suedeuxnim/gifts).



> written for danny suedeuxnim on the occasion of their birth, combining their two greatest loves, Ienzo and Riku angst. Happy birthday!!! I'm so glad to get to know you!!! Thanks for living in cozy KH hell with me for the past several months and also the foreseeable future!!!!!

Naminé is eager to leave Radiant Garden, and though Ienzo does not share her sentiments, he can certainly understand them. For someone like her, to whom memory is at times a distressingly tangible thing, this place must be intolerable. Steeped in so much terrible history not her own. Even her own memories of waking up here a few short days ago must be painful. Ienzo does not imagine that his face, or Even’s, or Ansem’s, were the ones that she most wanted to see.

She’s been unfailingly polite during her stay here, but Ienzo thinks that everyone involved will breathe a sigh of relief once she’s gone. 

Riku is coming to pick her up. Ienzo arranged it with him over the Gummiphone, in a stilted conversation that he grimaces to remember. When he receives a text informing him that Riku is parked outside, he relays the information to Naminé and turns back to his experiments, assuming that will be the end of it.

“Are you coming?” she asks. “I’m sure Riku wants to thank you for all your help.”

“I believe it’s us who should be thanking him,” Ienzo says. “All of you, really.”

“You helped too,” Naminé says, in her calm but firm manner. Ienzo is curious to realize that he’s going to miss it. “You shouldn’t forget that.”

“I won’t.” Ienzo feels strange around Naminé. He never spoke with her at Castle Oblivion, and is thankful for that fact—he can’t imagine he would have had any kind words to spare. But when he’s with her, he can feel the shadow of all that she’s been through at the hands of men that Ienzo respects. Respected. He can’t imagine it’s any more of a pleasant experience for Naminé, to be in his presence. “But I’m sure I’ll see Riku another time. I wouldn’t want to intrude on your reunion.”

Naminé smiles at him, kind and shrewd. “All right. I’ll tell him you say hello.”

There’s no one else here to see her off, and so she walks out alone. Ienzo turns away. Perhaps he should have asked her more questions while he had the chance. About the lingering nature of memory, a topic that has been on Ienzo’s mind quite often since his recompletion. He blinks down at the petri dishes he’s been working with. He can’t recall what he was supposed to be doing with them.

He’s going back through his notes, frustrated with himself, when there’s a hesitant knock on the door.

Naminé couldn’t have forgotten something; she had nothing to take with her. Even and Ansem are busy with their own projects. Aeleus and Dilan are guarding the doors. Demyx left in search of entertainment an hour ago. So Ienzo is not surprised when he turns and sees Riku standing there. He’s one of the few people it could be. And yet, lack of shock notwithstanding, Ienzo’s reaction is much stronger than is warranted. He breathes in sharply through his nose. He drops his notebook, fingers suddenly clumsy. His heart rate increases with no obvious physiological cause. 

“Uh, hey,” Riku says, shifting on his feet. “I was hoping that I could talk to you for a minute.”

“And further delay Naminé’s return?” The words come out more harshly than Ienzo intends. He presses his lips together. Riku is his ally. Riku was instrumental in Xehanort’s defeat. Riku is grieving, like the rest of Sora’s friends, and doesn’t need Ienzo’s ire. 

It’s Zexion’s ire, really, peaking through the shell Ienzo has made around him. It is not easy, trying to leave the man he was for years behind. Zexion was always resourceful. And he was very good at hiding in plain sight.

“She’s sketching in the square,” Riku says. “I think she’ll be okay for a little while.” 

Ienzo inclines his head, inviting Riku into the lab. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, or to do anything but stand fast against the part of him that is insistent that he should run.

Riku walks in. He looks different these days. Different than the boy who nearly ended Zexion’s existence, and quite different than the boy who finished the job. 

Ienzo’s fingers brush the fabric of his cravat. He closes his hand into a fist, and forces it down to rest at his side. 

“I have a message for you.” Riku isn’t comfortable here. He fidgets, and then crosses his arms, forcing his hands to still.

“From whom?” 

Riku looks away then, his admirable bravado finally failing him. “The other me,” he says. 

The lab is very quiet, absent of all others. The whir of the computers is the only sound, save for their breaths. “The other you is dead.” Dead in a much more permanent way than Ienzo has ever been.

“Hearts are pretty resilient, it turns out.” Riku shrugs, as if that explains anything at all. Under different circumstances, Ienzo would demand an explanation. In this case, he thinks the lack of one might be a blessing. “We talked. He’s gone now, but—well, it’s complicated. But he had things he wanted to say to Naminé, and to—to Sora—and to you.” Riku’s voice cracks on Sora’s name, and all at once he isn’t a shining hero of the keyblade any longer. He’s a boy mourning the loss of his best friend. A boy who has had the foundations of his life unsettled beneath his feet, all the things he’s known to be true suddenly revealed for the comforting fictions that they are. A boy who was once taken by the darkness just as cruelly as Ienzo was, and who has spent years clawing his way back. “He wanted me to tell you that he was sorry.”

Ienzo’s head snaps up. “Sorry?”

Riku meets his eyes. “Yeah. He said it might not mean anything, but he wanted you to know. And...I’m sorry too. For what it’s worth.” He tucks his hands in his pockets, looking away again. “Not for defeating you back then. You definitely deserved it. But I know you don’t like being around me, and—I get it. I look just like him. I know what that feels like.”

Zexion would have drawn this conversation out. He would have forced Riku to say what, exactly, his Replica had to apologize for. But Ienzo already feels sick at the thought of it. He can feel the ghost of the Replica’s fingers around his throat. 

In the moments before he ceased to be, Zexion probably felt more than he had in all the preceding years of his life as a Nobody. Shock to see Axel with Riku, relief that it wasn’t _that_ Riku, and then fear, all-consuming and cloying, the first and last time Zexion was sure that there was anything within his ribs other than nothing. 

“Anyway,” Riku says. “That’s all I had to say. I can go.” 

“Wait,” Ienzo says, surprising them both. Riku looks up at him, his stance shifting in such a way that suggests he’s bracing for impact. “You shouldn’t be _sorry_ ,” Ienzo snaps, flinching from the tone of his voice just as much as Riku does: it’s pitch-perfect Zexion, an unwanted recollection for the both of them. “Neither of you should. He was just a boy. Axel used him. And all of us used you for our own ends. I’m the one who should be apologizing.”

Riku leans back against the wall. “I kind of get the sense you’ve done enough of that.”

Ienzo laughs. It’s the kind of laugh Zexion was quite comfortable with: entirely artificial. “No,” he says. “You know the things I’ve done. I could never apologize enough. I don’t think I’ll ever be finished.” 

“I thought that once too,” Riku says. “I thought that I didn’t deserve forgiveness for letting the darkness overtake me. I thought everyone would be better off without me. But...a friend of mine told me that I was being stupid. He was right. I made a mistake, but I was just a kid. I trusted the wrong people. And I’ve done my best to make up for it. Whatever mistakes you made, Ienzo, I know you’re not going to make them again.”

Ienzo stares at him. It shouldn’t be comforting. It isn’t, exactly—Riku’s presence is anything but comforting. In fact, Ienzo still can’t quite look him in the eye, not without feeling as though the floor has gone to liquid beneath his feet. But comfortable or not, he can’t open his mouth and tell Riku that he should still be groveling over the choices he made years ago, the ones he’s worked tirelessly to fix. 

Ienzo stood in this lab once over a decade ago, no more than a child. He made a mistake. He misplaced his trust. He and Riku and the Replica were for a single moment in their lives all precisely the same: young boys so sure they were on the right path that they didn’t even realize what it meant to be lost.

“Thank you,” Ienzo says, eyes fixed on the floor. “I am sorry, for all that you and your friends suffered at the hands of the Organization. And I’m sorry that I see another’s face when I look at you. It isn’t fair to you.”

Riku’s mouth quirks up. “Like I said,” he says. “I get it. It happens.” 

They stand there like that for another moment, and then Riku sighs, pushing himself off the wall. “I really should get going, though. Naminé’s excited to go to the beach.”

Ienzo smiles at that, unforced. “I’m sure she is,” he says. “You are both welcome here anytime—please don’t hesitate to call us if there’s anything we can do to help.”

“Uh huh,” Riku says, tone only just skeptical.

“I do mean it,” Ienzo says. “I know that I’m—uncomfortable around you. I’m afraid that will always be true. But you’re still deserving of our help should you need it.” He looks down at his hands, clasped together in front of him. “You’re going to find Sora, aren’t you?”

Riku shrugs, as if he has no opinion one way or the other. It’s not very convincing. 

“Well,” Ienzo says, “I owe Sora a debt. I would consider it a favor to me, if you’d allow me to help return him to where he belongs.”

“Twist my arm, why don’t you.” Riku shakes his head. “Sure. I’ll let you know.” He raises a hand over his shoulder as he leaves.

Alone in the lab once again, Ienzo sits back down, retrieving his notebook from where he dropped it. He flips through a few pages, trying to pick the thread of his experiments back up, but it’s useless. He can think only of the Riku Replica, the searching way he’d looked at Axel as he told him how to be _real_. 

His throat aches. Not because of that memory. Because of an older one, of a young boy who thought that the right thing to do was always to listen to his teachers. Who knew that they would never lead him astray. Ienzo imagines that the look in his own eyes wasn’t much different from the Replica’s, in the moment before everything fell to pieces: trusting and sure, with regret the last thing on his mind. 

He has more than enough regrets for a lifetime now, and just as many ways to go about remedying them. It would be a disgrace to Sora’s memory, to the boy who once told Riku he was being stupid, to do anything else.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr and twitter as luckydicekirby!


End file.
